Create Your Social Media Marketing Strategy in 4 Easy Steps

Creating an effective social media marketing strategy is no easy feat. For that reason, we've brought you an easy four-step process to getting started.

Creating a social media marketing strategy can be an excellent move toward achieving many business goals.

However, most entrepreneurs today dive into social media marketing without a clear definitive plan and often end up wasting time and money.

To be successful in social media, you need a plan. It will guide you through the ever-changing world of social networks and help you meet your goals.

Most businesses, unfortunately, don’t know how or where to start.

In this post, we’ll show you how to create a social media marketing strategy in 4 easy steps.

Follow our 4-Step Plan to Create your Strategy Today

1. Know Your Audience

The first step to creating a social media strategy is to define your audience. To date, there are now 3.81 billion social media users globally. Choosing everyone as your target audience will cause your content to lose focus.

You need to be as specific as possible with the definition of your audience.

Your research should provide information on these critical pieces of information:

Age

Location (City/Country)

Income level

Profession

Interests

Pain points

Widely used Social Media

“The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.” – Peter Drucker

Having this information is very important. You won’t market to a teenager the same way you market to a business owner.

While teens may be posting their daily activities on Snapchat, a business owner may be answering questions on Quora.

Creating customer personas will guide you on how to approach your customers.

2. Define Success

Defining success will help you set SMART goals for your strategy. By SMART goals, we mean goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound.

Setting effective goals will serve as your basis for identifying which metrics to measure. These metrics will tell you whether your campaigns are succeeding or failing so you can amp up or revamp accordingly.

3. Plan your Content

“If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail!” – Benjamin Franklin

Content is king.

A key component of your social media marketing strategy is content. What’s more, you need to share interesting and relevant content with your audience.

However, it’s a bad idea to create or curate content the same day as you’re posting it. You can’t bring out your A Game daily. You must plan in advance by creating a content plan or calendar.

Having a content calendar allows you to plan for weeks, months, or even a year ahead. This relieves you of the pressure of having to come up with content just before you post it.

Your content plan will also guide you on:

How often you’ll post to social media

When you’ll post

The type of content you’ll post

Whether you’ll create or curate content

Which social media channel to post each content

Additionally, creating a content calendar allows you to schedule your posts in advance. This means you can focus on other things like engagement, while posts are published automatically at set times.

4. Track results, Analyze and Optimize

There’ll be a lot of trial and error on your journey to success on social media. That is why you need to track and analyze successes and failures and optimize accordingly.

If you notice something is working, double down on it. If something is not working, scrap it or find a way to make it work.

Most social networks provide you with analytics tools. Pay attention to the insights these tools offer and readjust your strategy accordingly.

Adapt and Excel

Social media is continuously evolving. A strategy that worked yesterday may not work today.

At first, images had the most engagement on Facebook, but now it’s videos.

Don’t sleep on your success. Rework always on your social media strategy as you gain more insights.